My last post I talked about my experience hosting images on Flickr and the total lack of traffic I recieved from Google Image search. I decided to take it a step further and see if I can get some more data on this.My general hypothesis is that Google give a preference to images hosted on the same domain as the page it is linked from. The rational for this fr...

I've found very little written on this subject, so I thought I'd take the time to write what I have learned and hopefully raise some questions which can be addressed by people with more SEO experience than myself. I run a very photo heavy travel blog. I have a photo which I post every day in addition to ph...

Shouldn't the author of the link which is retweeted, not the person who tweets the link, be the real authority?

Google Author is a much better step in this direction.

I know many people who do nothing but autofollow, build up huge follower numbers and then spam their stream with links and other quotes that will get retweeted. They don't really have authority, they are just gaming Twitter.

So, I can gain authority by posting more inspiration quotes and photos of cats?? Awesome!

All those accounts in red show the problem by counting retweets. It is the same problem that Klout and other attempts at determining authority have.

You are only tracking metrics that are available for you to track. Real authority comes in how many people pay attention and act based on what they say. If I quote other people and that gets retweeted, I add nothing to the conversation, yet by this metric I would have high authority. The real authority would be in the people who's ideas I am tweeting.

The problem will all attempts at determining social media authority is that it rests upon a very small set of data. The authority algorithms use that data, not because it is the best or logical data to determine authority, but because there is no other data to use.

The one issue you didn't address is competition. Travel is different from many niches in the amount of competition from very large players you have to deal with. There is a LOT of competition in the travel space. Trip Advisor, Expedia, Yelp, Lonely Planet, Fodors, Frommers, etc. These are huge brands which tons of authority that tend to dominate most of the lucritave keywords. Trip Advisor has a full time SEO team and Google seems to love traditional publishers. It is extremely difficult to do well on any good keyword unless you are wiling put in time doing link building, which really isn't possible or realistic for any given blog post. This was the entire crux of my argument from the article I wrote last November in ProBlogger which you wrote an article in response to. I'm not really disagreeing with anything you are saying, but after several years in the trenches doing travel blogging I've found the best bang for my buck to be with social media, not SEO. The primary reason has to do with the enormous amount of money thrown at SEO in the travel sector. I just can't compete with that. After 5 years of blogging and over 2,000 posts, the vast majority of my search engine traffic still comes from people looking for my name or the name of my website. I personally have a lot of authority when it comes to travel. I've been to 100 countries and have spent 4.5 years of my life on the road. However, I can never have more authority than Trip Advisor, Lonely Planet or any large player in the eyes of Google's algorithim. I can't even come close. I can only have that in the eyes of actual people.

After I change my title tags, then what? I'm still going to put most of my time and effort into social media.
Yes, I'm aware that long tail searches drive most search engine traffic. What should I do about it? Do link building for each and every long tail phrase, or for every article I write?
As I stated in my original Problogger article, setup your site properly and then don't worry about it. If I have to fix my title tags on my site, then so be it. Maybe I'll get more traffic, but 90% of the people who visit my site will still do so through social media channels.
As for big companies being worried about bloggers, they are worried about the entire collective blogosphere, which I agree is probably on a par with a given big media outlet, or maybe several.
But they have resources to hire consultants like you and most bloggers don't. The very fact that you are talking about a client who had the money to hire a consultant sort of proves the point. Lone bloggers can't do that.
Also, you still seem to be missing my point. It isn't a matter of SEO being good or bad. I'm not anti SEO. I can grant everything you are saying about SEO.
Go back and read David Ricardo's theory of Comparative Advantage. For an individual blogger, the comparative advantage lies in social media.
November 16, 2010

1) It would depend on what you are trying to covert. Word of mouth is often sufficient to get someone interested in something. There are some great examples of small businesses using social media to get the word out about themselves. Most people don't search for new restaurants, they just find out about it from friends. Often times, if you don't know something exists, you don't know to search for it.
2) To the extent you called my article "poorly argued controversy-bait" it is hard to take this post as anything but a direct response.
3) Even if conversions with social media are worse than SEO (something my experience disagrees with, but I'll grant it for the sake of argument), if you have to beat your head against a wall competing with huge media companies in the SERPs, then it really doesn't matter. The poor conversion rate is still going to be a better ROI than trying to spend massive amounts of time and money against larger companies in SEO. In my case I run a travel blog. Every major newspaper in the world has a travel section. There are cable TV networks devoted to travel, multiple, popular magazine, several publishing houses devoted exclusively to travel, and that is before I even get to the online powerhouses like TripAdvisor, which spends millions on SEO annually. USA Today just signed a content deal with Demand Media for travel content, which is going to pump more crap into the system.
It is like saying that the fertile soil of the midwest is better for raising crops than sand. That fact might be true, but it is meaningless if you live on an island. Sand is all you got.
I 100% grant you that in industries where you have limited or regional competition, SEO is probably a much smarter option. SEO is great for selling widgets.
I've never seen the issue I'm addressing above regarding competition against large media outlets addressed on any SEO sites (maybe I missed it or am reading the wrong things). It is something I think most SEO companies just never have to deal with.
As a blogger, it is something I have to deal with all the time. The payoff is far greater for me and other bloggers to do an end run around big media outlets and not try to play their game. It is a game I will lose, and expend a lot of time, energy and money in the process.
November 16, 2010

I had enormous block of text dealing with each of the issues I've outlined. If someone chooses to ignore them, that's not my fault.

Also, I didn't pick the title of the post, the editors at Problogger did.

I don't think that changed the title tags of my posts are going to suddenly result in 100,000 visits a month to my site, which is what would have to happen if SEO overtook social media for me.

Also, I'm not drawing a line in the sand. You again are missing the point. i'm talking about investing your time where it pays off the most. I'm not saying SEO Bad, Social Media good. I'm saying in areas where many bloggers exist (travel, food, sports, news, politics, entertainment) the competition in SEO from major brands makes the investment in time in social media payoff more than SEO, which established brands have an enormous head start and more resources.

you have completely missed the point I was trying to make in my Problogger article. Completely. I think you and the other SEO's that went off saw my article as a slam on the entire concept of SEO and the SEO industry. That is not what I was saying at all.

I never said that SEO didn't drive a lot of traffic.

I never said that many sites wouldn't find SEO to be better than social media.

I never said SEO was bad or that SEO traffic was bad.

I never said that social media was ‘better’ than SEO.

Most everything you've written is try trying to defend the concept of SEO, which is something I was never attacking. All the other people who make money selling SEO services had their hackles raise when they saw the title of the article and went on the defensive as if I was attacking SEO and their livelihood and ignored the point I was making.

My entire argument was about bloggers investing their time where it had the biggest payoff. That's it.

SEO might very well have big payoffs, but the time investment required to get those results would be better spent on social media for most BLOGGERS. (that being the operative word)

Your new blog proves my point in spades. The time you put into Social Media delivered far more traffic than search engines did. In fact, your personal blog might never get 22,000 visits from Google in a similar time frame, no matter how long it exists. The question then is, how much effort did you put into getting that social media traffic? I'm guessing not very much. That is the point I was trying to make.

Providing data for a B2B product has nothing whatsoever to do with my argument. NOTHING. If I had a website selling a B2B product I'd invest more in SEO too. Same with restaurants, hotels, plumbers, dentists or any number of businesses. There are tons of examples where SEO makes more sense than social media.

Moreover, you (and other SEO's) have totally ignored my argument about competing against traditional media. SEO and internet marketing is a space where the only competition is online. This is something that most SEO's have never realized, because they've never been in any other environment. Major newspapers do not have sections devoted to SEO. The BBC and the New York Times don't write about SEO. There aren't entire publishing companies and sections of bookstores devoted to SEO. Google loves big media brands and you work in an environment where you don't have to compete against them on a regular basis.

Providing data from SEOmoz completely misses the point. You've proven that SEO's use search engines. That's like proving that farmers use tractors. It would be far better to get data from your wife's travel blog. Anyone who blogs about food, sports, news, politics, travel, celebrities or entertainment exist in a totally different environment than people who just compete with other SEO sites. In fact, i'd guess most SEO customers don't have to worry about it either because the BBC and New York Times probably wont rank for "Seattle Dentist" or "high quality ball bearings".

And what does "Facebook audience biases" mean??? Facebook is the internet. There are half a billion people on it. The audience is pretty much everyone. Appealing to their biases is appealing to the biases of……people. Facebook isn't a random sample of the population anymore. If there is such a thing as "Facebook audience bias”, who cares??? Its half a billion people. More than enough to sustain any internet site if you only got a tiny fraction of the user base.

You claimed that my article was poorly argued, yet you never address the main points I was trying to make: getting the biggest results for your investment in time (which you proved my point on your personal blog), trying to compete as an independent blogger vs large corporate companies (never addressed), Google's bias towards media brands (never addressed), and comparative advantage individual bloggers have over corporations in social media (never addressed).

One final thing, my post was addressed to bloggers, on a blogging site by a blogger who has experience blogging. I’m guessing that the vast majority of your customers are not bloggers. If I weren’t a blogger but selling a product, I’d put most of my energy into SEO…but I’m not. Talking about buying Puma shoes totally misses the point.

It is disappointing that you and the other SEO’s who bothered to write articles in response didn’t even understand my argument or the audience I was making it for. Rather, you and others went off on a tangent about the general benefits of search engine traffic, as if to comfort yourself and your customers that everything you do is actually worthwhile.

I stated in my piece that if your only tool is a hammer, then every problem is a nail. I was directing that towards the SEO community. Your article sort of proves the point. Hammers are indeed valuable tools to have, but not every problem is a nail.

Google is running Analytics, Feedburner and Friend Connect out of the goodness of their heart. They are doing it to gather a way to validate what sites are real and what sites are not. If this data isn't being used already, it will be used to determine domain/site trust and authority.

Sites who do not use the Google services might not get punished so much as sites that use it will be helped.

One problem I've noticed with SEO/MMO/Blogging Advice sites is they often extrapolate experiences they have to the rest of the world without considering if there are things about their niche and their audience which are unique and cannot be applied to the internet as a whole. They run sites appealing to a very web savvy audience and people with a financial motivation for solving particular problems.

Sites focused on entertainment or news have a totally different audience. They rely less on SEO and more word of mouth. A niche like webcomics has an enormous audience, yet the main object of consumption can't even be indexed by search engines.

My site is entertainment related and social media blows SEO out of the water for me. In terms of strict ROI, time spent linkbuilding vs time spent on twitter, it is a no brainer. Even if conversion rates are higher from search engines, the raw numbers are so much greater from social media for me it makes the investment worth it. Its the difference between fishing with a line and reel vs fishing with a net.

Social media is also cheap. You don't have to hire a social media firm to do social media optimization. You also don't have to worry so much about everything being destroyed by a single company changing its mind.

I am a photographer. This happens all the time with photos. There are a large number of people who there who make a living stealing photos, creating linkbait lists and making money off the traffic.

The two biggest theives are weburbanist.com and webecoist.com. They provide links to the source of the theft as if that makes it ok. Go and check the original photos and you'd be hard pressed to find any under the Creative Commons which allow for commerical use and mashups. Often times they don't even link to the copyright holder of the photos, they only link to the site they stole it from, who may have stole it from someone else.

I've notified StumbleUpon and Digg about their rampant violation of copyright, but nothing happens. They have 100,000 RSS subscribers, without really producing any content.

There may not be anyting called "image jucice" but there are certainly some sort of criteria used in ranking. I don't know why matching the domain of the image with the domain of the linking page as a criteria is all that preposterous. I gave a good reason for why Google would want to use it as a criteria and why not using it as a criteria would be bad for them.

Is the evidence I have rock solid proof? No. But I the preponderance of evidence I think points in my direction. I've seen nothing, from search results to traffic from Google Image, which refutes my claim.

The assertion you make has zero evidence.

For the .com analogy to hold, you'd need to have some sort of evidence that the majority of images on the web are hosted on the same domain they are linked from. I don't see any evidence of this, nor would I know how to go about getting any data.

I have set up Gallery2. One thing I notieced was their naming scheme. They rename everything and often doesn't even have a file extension (.jpg). You really have to go through Gallery2 carefully to make sure it is optimized.

I am not sure Google targets Flickr per se so much as Flickr is caught in the self hosted domain issue. That would be much harder to show. I do believe that Flickr is given a bonus by Yahoo, just like YouTube is given a bonus by Google.

As I've been replacing Flickr images, I've noticed a lot of small problems like that and have been correcting them. I have at least four versios of each image on the server (thumbnail, 240px, 500px and original). I'm only worried about the 500px and 240px images for searching purposes. Thumbnails wont have proper text assoicated with it anyhow.

All the URLs should be normalized. If there are a few that are not, I still need to do that.

Thanks for the comments everyone. I've been away from the internet for the last several days driving through the Outback of Western Australia.

Some updates and replies to people:

I've managed to move my images to my site. I now have a Gallery2 installation running at Everything-Everywhere.com/Photography/. I have submitted that directory as a seperate website in the Google Webmaster site and have submitted a seperate sitemap. Enhanced images is turned on, but the photos are not appearing on Google yet.

I had a friend write a custom script to rename all the images so they were SEO friendly. The imported Flickr image file names were just strings of characters.

The direct linking of images should be solved now that I'm self hosting. Starting on May 29, I'll be posting self hosted images and starting the slow process of replacing old Flickr images.

Using nofollow for Flickr and Wikipedia is something I did recently. Because of the number of pages I have and links in my navigation bar, I had hundreds of outbound links to Flickr and I saw no reason to give them link juice. My SERP for "travel blog" has gone up considerably since then. (I go back and forth between page 1 and 2)

@Kenneth Dreyer Traffic has been difficult for me. My site seems rather sticky. I think I have a high percentage of RSS subscribers compared to my traffic. Teaming up with someone bigger is great in theory, but hard in practice. I also have the added challenge of trying to mantain a blog while actually traveling, often times I'm away from the internet for long stretches at a time. Honestly, my best luck with traffic has been Reddit and StumbleUpon. Search engines only account for about 14% of my traffic.

@Andy Fletcher You are correct. I've gotten enough quantity links, and I'm pretty much through with that. It has gotten me to page 1/2 of "Travel Blog". The only person I know of that has ever gotten much attention is the guy who did the video dancing in front of famous places.

@SEO Good Guy Try doing multiple searches on different keywords. Flickr almost is never on the front page. Certainly not as much as you'd expect given how popular the site is. If you look at most images which rank high, the image is hosted on the same domain as the page it is linked from. I suppose a very popular page could occasionally outweigh that, but it seems to be the rule. It might not be a Flickr penalty, so much as an off site penalty. Someone could probably write a script to measure this to see how strong the correlation is between domain links and the image domain.

@Mighty Workshop Agreed. I'm going to get someone to do a new WordPress theme for me soon. I think I'll have to axe the background image. My theme is very inefficient and doesn't handle ads very well.

I appreciate all the comments. This site is my baby and I welcome any and all advice. I've only started paying attention to SEO and marketing since the beginning of the year. May 28, 2008